Die Hard Trilogy, also released for Playstation, is actually three games in one (as the name might suggest) - Die Hard, Die Harder, and Die Hard with a Vengeance. This game is NOT to be confused with the utterly and amazingly badass Die Hard Arcade because this game isn't even worth playing. Each of the three games are a different genre; Die Hard is a third person shooter, Die Harder is a light gun rail shooter, and Die Hard with a Vengeance is a driving game. Die Hard gets decent after a while, and Die Harder isn't the worst game in the world, but Die Hard with a Vengeance is just terrible. It's poorly made, poorly tested, and poorly entertaining.
Die Hard starts off a lot of fun. Running around shooting people and finding ever better weapons. What's not to love? Well, for one, the graphics. Now, anyone who knows me knows that I don't really care about graphics. I have more fun playing Chopper Command for Atari 2600 than I do playing Call of Duty: Black Ops for Playstation 3. My gripe about these graphics is that they make the game almost unplayable.
It's incredibly difficult to tell where you are at times or where you need to go because the walls become transparent to let you see what's a room and what's just a wall. This isn't so bad at first, but as levels get more complex and have more rooms, it starts to get worse and worse until about halfway through the game, you're ready to give up. The hardest part by far (at least in my opinion) is finding the bomb at the end of the level. Whenever you deal with all of the hostages (either saving them or killing them), a bomb appears in an elevator somewhere in the level, and you have thirty seconds to get to that elevator before the bomb explodes and you lose a life and start over from the beginning of the level (if you have extra lives) or get game over (if you don't). Sometimes the bombs aren't that hard to find; there are levels where there are six elevators, all on one hallway. There are bombs that take dumb luck to find; there's a level with four elevators, one on each corner of the map. Fortunately, your mini-map pings red to show you the location of the bomb, but you have to get close enough.
Die Harder is the light gun rail shooter, and it's probably the best (or least bad) of the three. I had some trouble getting my light gun to register shots even after calibrating it (it wouldn't register anything about an inch and a half from any edge of the screen), but I was using a Nyko's "Cobra" light gun, and while it never got good, the hit recognition did seem to improve when I used Sega's Stunner. It's a pretty short game - I think it was 6 levels, though I could be off with that - but it's actually a fair bit of fun when the light gun decides to cooperate. You get a variety of weapons in the game, by far my favorite of which was the exploding shotgun. It's really more like an RPG. I was killing two or three enemies at a time if they were close enough together and I aimed my shot well enough. The MP5 was also a good gun, though, since it gave the rapid fire helpful in taking out a group of enemies before they shot you.
This game REALLY pushed the limits of how disappointing a game can be. It seems cool at first - a fast paced driving game - until you get into the nitty-gritty of the game. Most of the objectives in each level (of which there are roughly 16, I think) are to find bombs as quickly as you can, usually hidden in idle cars or telephone booths. Occasionally, though, you'll have to chase a bomb car and hit it enough times to destroy it before time runs out and the bomb detonates. That's where the game gets, at least for me, too difficult to be fun, especially the last level. What really makes this game suck, though, is the border glitches. Extra lives are fairly hard to come by in this game, and each time you fail to find a bomb or destroy a bomb car in the allotted time costs you a life. There are three main stages on which you play (excluding the brief race levels) - city, park, and pier. On the city levels, the only real difficulty is avoiding traffic and making turns quickly enough to get to your objective in time. On the park levels, ponds are introduced, and driving into the water, even a little bit, costs you a life and puts you back at the beginning of whatever objective you were doing (it usually happened to me chasing bomb cars). The pier, however, is where shit really hits the fan. As you can imagine from being on a pier, there's water. Everywhere. But you've got wooden railing surrounding the pier, so you should be safe, right? Well, maybe if the game were well made. Unfortunately, this game is FULL of border glitches on this level. You get snagged by invisible forces around boxes, you get caught in black holes hiding in buildings, and you get warped off of the pier and into the ocean if you get too close. The first pier level took me literally an hour and a half of trial, error, epic failure, and eventual lucky success to get past because I kept glitching into the ocean and losing lives.
I haven't played the Playstation version (which a Racketboy forum member threw in an extra gift when I bought my two Saturn light guns and Virtua Cop 2) enough to be able to say much about whether or not it's better or worse than the Saturn port. Maybe I'll play through that version in the future and write a follow up blog talking about any version differences I notice.
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